Top 100 A Surprise Quotes
#1. If people from their own country are killed, they may express surprise, grief, anger, and sympathy. But if ten thousand people are killed in a distant, far-off land, they will not be the slightest bit affected, particularly if it was their own doing.
Hiroshi Yamamoto
#2. A Bridgeport, Connecticut, man presented his girlfriend with an engagement ring and handed her one end of a ribbon; the other end disappeared into his pocket. "A surprise," he said, and urged her to pull it. She obliged. The ribbon was attached to the trigger of a revolver. The man died instantly.
Erik Larson
#4. I make my own surprises and I'm always surprised to see what I do, to see it when it's finished and the biggest challenge is once I finish it, it's not a failure. It's not a flop.
Robert Barry
#5. Puzzles are like songs - A good puzzle can give you all the pleasure of being duped that a mystery story can. It has surface innocence, surprise, the revelation of a concealed meaning, and the catharsis of solution.
Stephen Sondheim
#6. Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture, ... When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.
Rick Santorum
#7. Tennis is like a wonderful, longstanding relationship with a husband. Golf is a tempestuous, lousy lover; it's totally unpredicatable, a constant surprise.
Dinah Shore
#10. Sometimes people can surprise you. Sometimes they have a great capacity to hear the truth.
Joe Seneca
#11. Man is always more than he can know of himself; consequently, his accomplishments, time and again, will come as a surprise to him.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#12. It certainly should not surprise us that a young person without any real stake in a legitimate occupation or career may get into trouble more easily. Such persons readily accept the idea that they have been unjustly deprived of money, status, and opportunity.
Robert Kennedy
#13. Bob Marley performed the 'One Love Peace' concert in Jamaica with the two different warring political sides. There's always been that in black music and culture in general. It's no surprise because black music is such a reflection of what's going on in black life. It's not unusual for hip-hop.
Mos Def
#14. One of the elements of writing that is most delightful to the engaged reader is the element of surprise. And one of the ways to surprise the reader is to set up an expectation that you then veer away from it at the last moment. A stitch in time saves the penny earned. Or something like that.
Douglas Wilson
#15. A Scout is never taken by surprise; he knows exactly what to do when anything unexpected happens.
Robert Baden-Powell
#16. Silence, this will surprise you not, isn't really a Jewish concept.
Simon Schama
#17. I never assumed I would have that commercial success, so it was a total surprise. And honestly, I never assumed that it would ever happen again.
Tracy Chapman
#18. I've always liked New York, as I like towns with an edge and New York has a European feel, so when I came to play music here in the '80s it was a surprise to me.
Billy Childish
#19. And then something blossomed deep within and opened almost like the multitude petals of a rose, pushing back the tension in rippling waves as they bloomed until she surrendered to relaxation with a soft exclamation of surprise
Mary Balogh
#20. Lily," Mom said, "we need to talk."
I don't think I'm ruining the surprise by pointing out that nothing good happens when someone starts a speech like that.
Chloe Neill
#21. When a copier sales person cold calls a purchasing manager whom he has never met is it any surprise that the purchasing manager will most likely never return that call?
Josh Turner
#22. It will not surprise you to learn that it is not uncommon for jockeys who struggle with their weight to starve themselves and spend hours in the sauna to lose a few pounds to be able to make a big-race ride.
Tony McCoy
#23. People tend to play in their comfort zone, so the best things are achieved in a state of surprise, actually.
Brian Eno
#24. It must surprise people that I'm such a rap fan, but it's true. Sometimes, just staying in, putting on some rap music, and letting loose is all I need to have a good time.
Phoebe Tonkin
#25. To make sure I learned the etiquette of grieving, Granny took me with her to the many funerals she attended. O Death, where is thy sting? Search me. I grew up looking at so many corpses that I still feel a faint touch of surprise whenever I see people move.
Florence King
#26. But Hogwarts is hidden," said Hermione, in surprise. "Everyone knows that ... well, everyone who's read Hogwarts, A History, anyway." "Just you, then," said Ron.
J.K. Rowling
#27. Motherhood is the thing in a woman's life that catches her by total and complete surprise.
Melanie Shankle
#28. It's hard to remember that Jesus did not come to make us safe, but rather to make us disciples, citizens of God's new age, a kingdom of surprise.
Stanley Hauerwas
#29. Spirituality is a mixed-up, topsy-turvy, helter-skelter godliness that turns our lives into an upside-down toboggan ride of unexpected turns, surprise bumps and bone shattering crashes ... a life ruined by a Jesus who loves us right into his arms.
Mike Yaconelli
#30. I know what you want. You want a story that won't surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won't make you see higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality.
Yann Martel
#31. To his surprise he ... discovered that it was possible to be good at what you had little interest in, just as it had been possible to be bad at something ... that you cared about a great deal.
Richard Russo
#32. No race has the last word on culture and on civilization. You do not know what the black man is capable of; you do not know what he is thinking and therefore you do not know what the oppressed and suppressed Negro, by virtue of his condition and circumstance, may give to the world as a surprise.
Marcus Garvey
#33. The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.
Susan Sontag
#34. The techs tell him the girl on the other side of the glass hasn't said a word since they brought her in. It doesn't surprise him at first, not with the traumas she's been through, but watching her now from behind the one-way mirror, he starts
Dot Hutchison
#35. And this should not surprise us. The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#36. The fact that ghosts are real doesn't surprise me-I've always been a believer in that area. It's the realization that there may be something out there, something most can't see, that is able to kill.
Brandy Nacole
#37. Surprise is not humor. I think that there can be a fine line there.
Keegan-Michael Key
#38. Solitude is an unmarked place beyond the borders of the map, a place where most fear to tread. It's no surprise, then, that this is where the greatest secrets and most valuable treasures are hidden.
Cristen Rodgers
#39. The passion for finding the system in experience, replacing surprise with order, is a persistent part of human nature ... Science came to mean the elimination of surprise. It outlawed miracles, because miracles are above all unexpected.
George Gilder
#40. There's a version of the future in my head where I stay here forever....Bleak, I know. But, still, there's a lot of comfort that comes with knowing how your life is going to turn out. I've never had a surprise turn out in my favor.
Julie Murphy
#41. if you'll take a step of faith to become someone else's miracle, God is going to surprise you in ways you never imagined.
Jamie Larbi
#42. Your total intelligence knows how to accomplish astounding feats. You just need a clear objective. Get clear. You will surprise yourself!
Bryant McGill
#43. If we get total certainty, we get ... bored out of our minds. So, God, in Her infinite wisdom, gave us a second human need, which is uncertainty. We need variety. We need surprise.
Tony Robbins
#44. I think it's important for artists to work together. It's great for fans to see, like, Ludacris came out to our show in Atlanta and kinda made a surprise appearance there, it shows a mutual respect for what each other does.
Jason Aldean
#45. There is no perception without memory. But good art surprise us. Good art reorients our expectations, forces us to break the pattern, to see in a new way.
Siri Hustvedt
#46. We never really know what's around the corner when we're filming - what turn a story will take, what a character will do or say to surprise us, how the events in the world will impact our story.
Barbara Kopple
#47. Her first week on the job a caller went silent in surprise on the other end of the line, expecting to hear Miss Jacobs' voice. Bertie's response: "Speak ass, 'cause the mouth won't!
Dawn Shamp
#48. I think the movie business is in trouble. It's all movies that you've seen before. Everything's a remake; they want things that are familiar rather than things that surprise you.
Graydon Carter
#49. Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?
Alice Munro
#50. Much to my surprise, as I set them free, I was able to forgive myself for the judgments I had made about them. I now hold them in a loving space in my heart and honor them as my ancestors who love me and guide me each day.
Iyanla Vanzant
#51. The absence from the Dead Sea Scrolls of historical texts proper should not surprise us. Neither in the inter-Testamental period, nor in earlier biblical times, was the recording of history as we understand it a strong point among the Jews.
Geza Vermes
#52. Italian writer-director Paolo Sorrentino makes zombie movies, which probably comes as a surprise to him. At the center of his best and most recent pictures are the walking dead, characters in a race with themselves across mortality's finish line, their spirits arriving before the rest of them.
Steve Erickson
#53. It is on a day like this one,
a little later a little earlier
that you descover without surprise
that something is wrong
that you don't know how to live
and you will never know
Georges Perec
#54. In life the only thing that you can expect is the unexpected; the only surprise is a day that has none.
Joan Rivers
#55. It doesn't surprise me that people can't see beyond my image. It's amazing, but I can understand it. That's what image is for. But it's never a problem for me. It's only a problem for them. I don't really care. I do what I want regardless.
Grace Jones
#56. Continue to surprise those who would put you in a neat demographic. Be insistently curious.
Gordon Gee
#57. To try something longer, I entered a half-hour radio drama contest with the national public broadcaster, CBC. To my surprise, I won. And that opened doors in film and television, because that broadcaster was looking to cultivate new Canadian talent, especially women who could write.
Karen Walton
#58. Sara: "You are so brave," I tell her, and then I smile. "When I grow up, I want to be just like you."
To my surprise, Kate shakes her head hard. Her voice is a feather, a thread. "No Mommy," she says. "You'd be sick.
Jodi Picoult
#59. My host at Richmond, yesterday morning, could not sufficiently express his surprise that I intended to venture to walk as far as Oxford, and still farther. He however was so kind as to send his son, a clever little boy, to show me the road leading to Windsor.
Karl Philipp Moritz
#60. Better to put things at the worst at first and reserve the best for a surprise.
Jules Verne
#61. Tal's combinations often exert a sort of paralysing influence on the opponent's play. It would seem that the element of surprise plays a big part in this.
Mark Taimanov
#62. Luckily, with 'The Collector' the first time around, it really took off in the DVD world and foreign, so it was just a pleasant surprise that a couple of years later there we were, doing it again.
Josh Stewart
#63. He shook-a me up, he took me by surprise. He had a pickup truck, and the devil's eyes. He stared at me and I felt a change. Time meant nothing, never would again.
Richard O'Brien
#64. Frankly, I couldn't be more astonished that this guy was involved in something like this than if you came riding through my apartment on a hippopotamus.
Dan Rather
#65. You know what it was like? It was like thinking I was heading to a surprise party and instead it was a surprise pap smear.
Jen Lancaster
#66. When I did 'Bird,' it was a surprise to some people, first because I wasn't in it and second because most of the films I'd been doing were cop movies or westerns or adventure films, so to be doing one about Charlie Parker, who was a great influence on American music, was a great thrill for me.
Clint Eastwood
#67. God's love is a costly love. It never takes the easy path away from relationships. Instead, it plots how to move towards other people. It thinks creatively of ways to surprise them with love.
Edward T. Welch
#68. They don't understand why I want to take such a risk. These reactions don't surprise me. A transformation, especially one that is deliberately sought, is often perceived as something disloyal, threatening.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#69. Jesus Christ: A common exclamation indicating surprise, disgust, anger or bewilderment.
Chaz Bufe
#70. Did he say:"Hullo,Pippin!This is a pleasant surprise!"?No,indeed!He said:"Get up,you tom-fool of a Took!Where,in the name of wonder,in all this ruin is Treebeard?I want him.Quick"
-Pippin Took
J.R.R. Tolkien
#71. You may pray to God to remove the hills on your way and fill every pothole on your path; but don't be surprised if God gives you a shovel to do so!
Israelmore Ayivor
#72. Well, hello there, Mother," Sebastian said in a voice like silk. "Surprised to see me?
Cassandra Clare
#73. He felt sorry for me. He wanted a plain country woman and that's what he married, and then he held it against me the rest of my life like I was supposed to change and surprise him somehow.
Marsha Norman
#74. The end is never a surprise. People say Don't tell me, Don't spoil it, then later say, If only I'd known.
Julia Pierpont
#75. You couldn't escape the literary atmosphere in our home. I grew up as a Britisher. I played a protagonist of every nationality in stage adaptations of Shakespeare and Brecht. I graduated from Yale. When I moved to the U.S., I realized with some amount of surprise that I was seen as an ethnic actor.
Satya Bhabha
#76. He that would relish success to a purpose should keep his passions cool, and his expectations low; and then it is possible that his fortune might exceed his fancy; for an advantage always rises by surprise; and is almost always doubled by being unlooked for.
Jeremy Collier
#77. Expect nothing at all and accept as a joyful surprise whatever good you find in matrimony.
Frank Leslie
#78. A very pleasant surprise was that items I thought were naughty but that I enjoyed immensely, like strong coffee, dark chocolate, nuts, high fat yoghurt, wine and cheese, are actually likely to be healthy for me and my microbes.
Tim Spector
#79. I hate you, Jesse!" she reminded him. To her surprise, he smiled a slow, anguished, crooked smile. "I know," he said, and added very softly, "and I still love you.
Heather Graham
#80. And then, one morning, you're startled to discover that you no longer feel this terrible burden. What a surprise to notice that the angst has disappeared. Why on that particular day? Why not later, or sooner? It's the totalitarian decision of our body.
David Foenkinos
#81. Life rarely develops as we expect. People surprise us, sometimes in unpleasant ways. They don't always react as we hope they will or want them to.
A.A. Aguirre
#82. Jake leaned on the horn, swearing loudly. Gina covered her eyes. Doc flung his arms around me, burying his face in my lap, and Dopey, to my great surprise, began to scream like a girl, very close to my ear ...
Meg Cabot
#83. The Western media is unleashing such a baseless propaganda, which make us surprise but it reflects on what is in their hearts and gradually they themselves become captive of this propaganda. They become afraid of it and begin to cause harm to themselves.
Osama Bin Laden
#84. I feel like movies should stick to a genre and give the audience what they want, and then surprise them with the unexpected, and not just do the same thing you've always seen.
Paula Patton
#85. You have only 30 seconds in a TV commercial. If you grab attention in the first frame with a visual surprise, you stand a better chance of holding the viewer. People screen out a lot of commercials because they open with something dull. When you advertise fire-extinguishers, open with the fire.
David Ogilvy
#86. To my surprise, the more I searched about Qi Xiangfu, the more I found of a life lived partly online. He once wrote a short memoir in which he described himself in the third person, with the formality usually reserved for China's most famous writers.
Evan Osnos
#87. It was hard to imagine him sneaking around and leaving a rose on anyone's doormat, but I guess boys will surprise you sometimes.
Rebecca Stead
#88. I've never had a surprise birthday party. I've had every other type of surprise. I've had surprise beatings, surprise drug tests, surprise daughter I think.
Dave Attell
#89. In this town of towheaded drunks, [his daughter] would bear the weight of her difference, doled out in murmurs, taunts, and shoves. But now it occurred to Victor that she would suffer more than he ever had because, unlike him, she had been loved, and her punishment would come as a surprise.
Anya Ulinich
#90. I'm not sure that it's possible to write a novel about people who don't transgress or stumble, people who don't surprise themselves with the things they do, people who can explain all their actions with perfect logical consistency. At least it's not possible for me to write that sort of novel.
Tom Perrotta
#91. I am going in there to win this fight. I don't think people are taking me seriously. I'm gonna surprise a lot of people. This guy helped two people make history.
Bernard Hopkins
#92. That is why historians surprise me. They seem to have no talent for the likeliness of any situation. They see history like a peepshow; with two-dimensional figures against a distant background.
Josephine Tey
#93. She had Nick Lachey's body, a deep voice, very small boobies, and a crew cut. It would have come as no surprise if she had walked into the backyard to compete in a rock-hurling competition after dinner.
Chelsea Handler
#94. I think it's part of the responsibility of an artist to shock, to upset, to make people think differently, and to surprise people. And that's where the good humor is, if there's a surprise and there's something unexpected. Something that's not normal, not in the realm of general living expectations.
Bill Plympton
#95. I'd kind of already been expecting the worst, to be in this alone. Now I knew. Twice he'd disappointed me; this couldn't be a surprise. Nothing had changed, not really.
Kylie Scott
#96. 'A Court of Thorns and Roses,' big surprise, was inspired by music. By actually listening to the 'Princess Mononoke' soundtrack.
Sarah J. Maas
#97. She would smile and show no surprise, convinced as she was, the same as I, that casual meetings are apt to be just the opposite, and that people who make dates are the same kind who need lines on their writing paper, or who always squeeze up from the bottom on a tube of toothpaste.
Julio Cortazar
#98. I sat silently, trying to imagine Pam blown away. I could do it, but the face I saw lighting up in surprise and wonder was a younger face. It had been quite a few years since I'd been able to generate that sort of wind.
Stephen King
#99. It's a trifle hard to surprise yourself with a story you've written.
Ed Greenwood
#100. That's good. Because you're going to be my assistant." He grins like a Cheshire cat.
I raise my eyebrows in surprise. "I am?"
"Yep, I'm going to put my hands all over that body of yours in the front of the room and you're going to kick my ass.
Vi Keeland
